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I. CARD SORTING VARIATIONS

There’s more to card sorting than it seems. Donna Spencer, card sorting expert and Founder of Maadmob, believes that while card sorting might not provide a final structure, it does provide a rare glimpse into users’ mental models. For such a simple activity, there’s plenty of variation and controls that will affect the kind, and validity, of data you receive. For starters, there are two different styles of how you can conduct it:

• Open Sorting — Users are provided only with the elements, and are left to group them however they see fit. Once grouped, users are asked to give names to the groups themselves. This is recommended for generating new ideas since you can work backwards from users’ natural thought processes.

source: Smashing Magazine

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• Closed Sorting — As with open sorting, users are given the elements; however, they are asked to categorize them into predefined groups. This is recommended if you’re working within the restrictions of pre-existing categories, for example, when updating an already developed website structure.

The above image is an example of a closed card sort. In this case, you can see the four categories in blue and the cards below. Users are then asked to place the cards under whatever category seems best to them. If this were an open card sort, you’d simply remove the blue categories and ask users to create their own.

Aside from open and closed, other variations include groups or individuals, and remote or on-location. Groups allow users to work collaboratively, for better or worse, and can help you learn about multiple users at once; however, group dynamics might affect your results. Remote location testing — for example, using an online software tool — allows you to test more users in a faster time, yet you’re unable to directly observe their decision-making processes. On-location gives you a fuller understanding of how your users came to their decisions, but requires more planning and scheduling.

source: Card Sorting

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II. CARD SORTING GUIDELINES

While every card sort is different depending on the cards, William Hudson, UX Strategist and Consultant, suggests some general benchmarks for card sorting. Specifically, he lists the approximate times it will take people to sort a given number of elements:

• ~20 minutes for 30 elements• ~30 minutes for 50 elements• ~60 minutes for 100 elements

Using this time structure, you can plan out in advance how long the tests will take to administer, once the cards are written or the software established. From our experience, these guidelines can be quite generous — one of our closed card sorts involved 47 cards and four categories, but only required an average of three minutes to complete.

When naming the cards, simpler is better. Avoid big words (many syllables) and technical jargon. While this is good advice in general for the language usage of a product, it’s essential for card sorting since overly complex labeling will disrupt the natural thought processes. Pierre Croft, IA and UX expert for Decibel Digital believes that card sorting can help deflect the bad ideas of HIPPOS (highest paid people in the room) who might not know how to build a good website. Card sorting is cheap, useful, and quick, so we’ve included a few pointers:

• Don’t mix parent and child categories — In other words, use categories from the same level, or else you will confuse your participants.

• Provide some blank cards and pens — While this is standard procedure for open card sorting, it’s also quite useful for closed card sorting. After the formal testing is done, you can provide a couple blank cards for

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participants to write down additional categories. While the information might be “off-the-record,” it could bring to light some useful insights.

• Don’t intervene — After giving the instructions, try your best to sit back and observe the participants (unless they ask for help). Intervention will obscure the data.

• Accept that sometimes users don’t group everything — A lack of grouping can be just as telling as a structured sorting. If this happens, make sure you ask the user why. If you’re running a closed sort and not everything is sorted, you can also provide blank cards to see why the existing categories weren’t chosen.

• Set time limits — This makes scheduling easier in general, and gives the participants an idea of how much time to spend on their tasks.

If your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages, you can choose only first and second-level pages to keep things manageable. For example, “Contact Us,” “Terms of Agreement,” and other utility pages can be omitted since they can be found on almost all websites out there (so you wouldn’t really be testing anything unique to your site).

User Interviews

If you want to know what users think, sometimes all you have to do is ask. Interviews directly connect you with your target audience and give you a high degree of control over what data you collect; however, your research is mostly qualitative and limited by the participant’s self-awareness and articulation.

”For card sorting, simpler is better. Avoid unnecessarily complex words and jargon.”TWEET THIS